Daily Archive: June 19, 2018

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”

And

“A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.”

And

“Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.”

And

“Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?”

And

“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”

And

“Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.”

And

“Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

And

“Dreams are the touchstones of our character.”

And

“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.”

And

“How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.”

And

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”

And

“I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.”

And

“If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.”

And

“If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.”

And

“In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high.”

And

“It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?”

And

“Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.”

And

“Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.”

And

“Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.”

And

“Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”

And

“Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.”

And

“The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.”

And

“The law will never make a man free; it is men who have got to make the law free.”

And

“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”

And

“There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.”

And

“What is once well done is done forever.”

And

“What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.”

And

“When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.”

And

“The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls — the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.”

And

“I heartily accept the motto, “That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe — “That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.”

And

“If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!”

And

“I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. All great enterprises are self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes. You must get your living by loving.”

And

“Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice? What is it to be born free and not to live free? What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom? Is it a freedom to be slaves, or a freedom to be free, of which we boast? We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost defences only of freedom. It is our children’s children who may perchance be really free.”